Eduardo Ramirez of Peekskill, who will graduate as a member of the Archbishop Stepinac High School Class of 2022, has been accepted to Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) Summer Research Program. The academically top performing student will have the rare opportunity to work with a professor on a research fellowship.
It is the latest in a series of significant academic achievements for Ramirez who will begin as a Columbia University student this fall where he plans to pursue his studies in applied mathematics.
Columbia’s DBMI is one of the oldest informatics departments in the nation. It is also an information services partner to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a major healthcare provider in greater New York. The department comprises faculty and staff who have undertaken research in the development and evaluation of innovative information technologies that have led to enhancements in both health and healthcare.
A member of Stepinac’s Honors Academy, last year Ramirez was among 1,345 high school students from 85 countries who earned the top honor of joining the finalist ranks in the 2021 GENIUS Olympiad’s international high school competitions.
Ramirez’s research project, entitled “Discovering predictive gene signatures in BRCA (Breast Carcinoma) patients via a novel hierarchical Bayesian Boolean matrix factorization framework,” analyzes the likelihood of inter-molecular conversations between the cancer cells to track, predict, and prevent further spread of the tissue.
In his sophomore year, Ramirez co-founded a unique community service with Kimberly Alvarez, another student who lives in Peekskill. Named Roots to STEMs, the program recruits volunteer mentors to provide free instruction in science, technology, engineering and math to students in low-income communities where disparities in qualitative learning are prevalent.
